Accessing SILO climatic data for Australia in R

Dec 31, 2018
4 min read

This short post will describe how to access SILO climatic data for Australia. The data is available as both csv and json, but here we work with the two-dimensional csv format to make use of R’s powerful data table functionality.

At the time of writing there were 18937 stations. We can access the metadata on each station (including location and years of available data), which will later become useful for selecting an appropriate weather station.

Next we specify some options to help us select an appropriate weather station. The string loc is used to extract a coordinate using a geocoder. Alternatively you can manually input a longitude and latitude later. The dates startdate and enddate hold the dates across which we require climatic data. The string apikey holds the API key which is required to query the database and freely available upon registration at the SILO landing page.